Last year I finished the CMU Triathlon with a unimpressive time of 1:17:51, placing me 11th in my category.Â My plan at that time was to train intensively over the summer, improve my time, and finish a few places up this year.Â Instead, I spent most of the summer doing computer graphics research, which is fun but not very athletic.Â So this year I copped out and decided to do the triathlon as part of a team.Â However, I had a “secret plan”: since last year only two co-ed teams entered the triathlon, I knew that if I entered as part of a co-ed team, we were guaranteed to place.Â I convinced Brendan and Angela to join me and we sent in the registration form.

Today was the big triathlon day, but things didn’t quite go as expected.Â Here’s what happened:

7:00 AM
I wake up and pull on my cycling gear.Â Brendan comes up to my room as I’m putting air in my bicycle tires.Â I grab our registration packet and we head out.

7:45 AMThe race information meeting begins.Â Strangely enough, there’s no sign of Angela.Â While the race coordinator is outlining the course routes I head out to attempt to track her down.

8:10 AMI leave frantic messages for Angela at the lab and at her apartment.Â The race is supposed to begin in 20 minutes and neither Brendan nor I want to swim.

8:17 AMStill no Angela.Â In desperation, we call Casey.Â He wakes up after the phone rings three times.Â Unbelievably, he agrees to swim for us in the triathlon. Â The only problem is that he just woke up and the triathlon begins in 13 minutes.

8:27 AMCasey arrives, somewhat out of breath after running all the way from his off-campus apartment.Â He jumps in the pool just as the swimmers are heading to their marks.

8:30 AMThe race official fires the starting gun and we begin.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?Â It turned out that Angela had gone to the hospital with severe abdominal cramps, so I guess that she had a pretty good excuse.Â The race actually went pretty well for us, but since we no longer had a female on our team, we could no longer take advantage of my “secret plan”.Â The Male Team division is more competitive and has a greater number of entrants, so we ended up finishing fourth. Â We did win two free large pizzas in the post-race raffle, however.